The relationship between LGBT inclusion and economic development: Macro-level evidence

This study analyzes the relationship between social inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people and economic development.

gay money

It uses legal and economic data for 132 countries from 1966 to 2011. Previous studies and reports provide substantial evidence that LGBT people are limited in their human rights in ways that also create economic harms, such as lost labor time, lost productivity, underinvestment in human capital, and the inefficient allocation of human resources. This analysis uses a fixed effects regression approach and a newly-created dataset – Global Index on Legal Recognition of Homosexual Orientation (GILRHO) – to assess how these detriments are related to the macroeconomy. Our study finds that an additional point on the 8-point GILRHO scale of legal rights for LGB persons is associated with an increase in real GDP per capita of approximately $2000. A series of robustness checks confirm that this index continues to have a positive and statistically significant association with real GDP per capita after controlling for gender equality. In combination with the qualitative evidence from previous studies and reports, our quantitative results suggest that LGBT inclusion and economic development are mutually reinforcing. Also, a back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that about 6% to 22% of the finding could reflect the costs to GDP of health and labor market stigmatization of LGB people. Results from this study can help to better understand how the fuller enjoyment of human rights by LGBT people can contribute to a country’s economic development.

ScienceDriect.com, April 11, 2019

Click here for access to the study.

in Recently Added / Science  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

AI COULD SCAN IVF EMBRYOS TO HELP MAKE BABIES MORE QUICKLY

Embryo AI

IF A WOMAN (or non-female-identifying person with a uterus and visions of starting a family) is struggling to conceive and decides to improve their reproductive odds at an IVF clinic, they’ll likely interact with a doctor, a nurse, and a receptionist, not an AI specialist. They will probably never meet the army of trained embryologists working behind closed lab doors to collect eggs, fertilize them, and develop the embryos bound for implantation.

One of embryologists’ more time-consuming jobs is grading embryos—looking at their morphological features under a microscope and assigning a quality score. Round, even numbers of cells are good. Fractured and fragmented cells, bad. They’ll use that information to decide which embryos to implant first.

It’s more gut than science and not particularly accurate. Newer methods, like pulling off a cell to extract its DNA and test for abnormalities, called preimplantation genetic screening, provide more information. But that tacks on additional costs to an already expensive IVF cycle and requires freezing the embryos until the test results come back. Manual embryo grading may be a crude tool, but it’s noninvasive and easy for most fertility clinics to carry out. Now, scientists say, an algorithm has learned to do all that time-intensive embryo ogling even better than a human.

In new research published today in NPJ Digital Medicine, scientists at Cornell University trained an off-the-shelf Google deep learning algorithm to identify IVF embryos as either good, fair, or poor, based on the likelihood each would successfully implant. This type of AI—the same neural network that identifies faces, animals, and objects in pictures uploaded to Google’s online services—has proven adept in medical settings. It has learned to diagnose diabetic blindness and identify the genetic mutations fueling cancerous tumor growth. IVF clinics could be where it’s headed next.

“All evaluation of the embryo as it’s done today is subjective,” says Nikica Zaninovic, director of the embryology lab at Weill Cornell Medicine, where the research was conducted. In 2011, the lab installed a time-lapse imaging system inside its incubators, so its technicians could watch (and record) the embryos developing in real time. This gave them something many fertility clinics in the US do not have—videos of more than 10,000 fully anonymized embryos that could each be freeze-framed and fed into a neural network. About two years ago, Zaninovic began Googling to find an AI expert to collaborate with. He found one just across campus in Olivier Elemento, director of Weill Cornell’s Englander Institute for Precision Medicine.

wired.com by Megan Molteni, April 4, 2019

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in Assisted Reproductive Technology / Ethics / In the News / Recently Added / Science  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

WHY I’M AN ORTHODOX RABBI WHO IS GOING TO OFFICIATE LGBTQ WEDDINGS

Shouldn’t our Orthodox communities rush at the opportunity to keep as many Jews, including LGBTQ jews, engaged in their Judaism? Is this the Torah and this its reward?

orthodox LGBTQ

A queer friend of mine from a haredi Orthodox background had posed a query publicly on social media. She had attended a conference on LGBTQ inclusion. There she learned a practice of certain Catholic priests who described going into gay bars in full clerical garb: They would sit in the bar, and when queer Catholics approached them, the priests would affirm God’s love and their belonging place in the church.

My friend asked her community of observant Jews, acknowledging that rabbis don’t have any identifying clerical garb: When might Orthodox rabbis do the same?

As an Orthodox rabbi myself, I was intrigued. I discovered a rainbow kippah online and decided to purchase it.

It managed to garner attention the first day I wore it. A woman took a picture of me and motioned a thumbs-up. A homeless man on the subway who was begging for money approached, pointing to my kippah, and said, “Now I like that,” and bumped my fist. A man in high heels came up to me before getting off his stop and said, “Thanks for the yarmulke.” I even had made my way to the headquarters of Chabad Lubavitch that very same day for a meeting and a Hasid asked me where he could find a kippah like mine. I surmised: The kippah works.

But what is it symbolizing and is it enough?

The kippah is a symbol of my commitment to God, to Torah and the Jewish people. To me, the rainbow kippah is also a symbol that God and Judaism love you no matter your sexual orientation.

I understand that the plain reading of Leviticus considers homosexual sex a “toevah,” often translated as an abomination. I understand that Jewish law views kiddushin, the ritual ceremony of marriage, as a legal structure between a man and a woman. I know and respect this.

But I also believe that the Torah does not want human beings to live alone, and supports a covenantal relationship between parties as they build a faithful Jewish home. I know that Judaism has, for thousands of years, had a rich understanding of the diversity of gender identities. I know that the Torah affirms the God-endowed dignity of all human beings.

In the recent film “Boy Erased,” based off Garrard Conley’s memoir describing his experience in a gay conversion program, a scene between a Baptist pastor father and his adult gay son has stayed with me. Conley’s character says something along the lines of “I’ve tried to change, God knows I’ve tried. I can’t change. Now it is your turn.”

www.thejerusalempost.com, April 7, 2019 by Avram Mlotek

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in Ethics / In the News / Politics / Recently Added / Religious  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

I Wanted to Change the World for Gay Black People. Starting With Myself. Queer Love In Color

I’m working on a book based on my Times article, “Queer Love in Color,” a celebration of the joy and romance that queer couples and families of color share. Here’s how it came about — and how you can help.

queer love in color

Last year, I published an article that changed my life.

I was a few weeks into my job at The New York Times when I realized I was never taught how to love another gay, black man.

I mean, I’d done it. I’ve had fulfilling relationships and I’ve said “I love you” and meant it. But did I really know what I was doing? Did any of us? It’s hard to do something you’ve never seen. For most of my life, the most visible queer couples in media have been white. I’d always been aware of this, but I didn’t realize what it was doing to my head.

So I made a list of all the things in my life I started to question soon after working here.

  • The truth is hard. So hard that The Times, where I’m a digital storytelling and training editor, built an entire advertising campaignaround it. Is it too hard for me? Do I even know how to do journalism? Do I have a basic grasp of the English language?
  • How do I single-handedly reverse over a century of problematic representation and erasure of minority communities by the media? Will it make me Twitter-famous? 
  • How do I learn to love other gay men? When I figure this out, how do I teach the rest of the gay community? 

I got to thinking.

Six months earlier, I had been in Orlando, at a gay bar with a young man named Josean, whose two best friends were murdered in the Pulse Nightclub shooting 357 days earlier. We were searching for Khia, rapper of “My Neck, My Back” fame, who was performing a benefit show for survivors of the shooting and their families. (We never found her.)

Late that evening, I met another young man, who, upon learning I was a journalist, lamented the media’s coverage of the Pulse shooting and its aftermath, and the focus on bloodshed and tragedy over the community’s continuing story of strength and triumph.

I was emotionally overwhelmed by both that story and that moment and felt a clarity of mission that I’d never felt before.

I remember wishing I had someone to talk to. Or alcohol. Or tacos. (There are great tacos in Orlando.)

Instead, back at my hotel, I cried and watched TV and eventually I was no longer awake.

About a year after crying myself to sleep in that Orlando hotel room, I wrote and photographed an article called “Queer Love in Color” for The New York Times. That was a life-changing experience, too, in the literal sense. I grew more optimistic about love, the queer community and our ability to honestly represent the two in our reporting. 

NYTimes.com, April 6, 2019 by Jamal Jordan

Click here to read the entire article.

in In the News / Personal Stories / Politics / Recently Added  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Challenge to Trans Student Bathroom Access Advances

Federal court says valid sexual harassment, religious freedom claims asserted on trans bathroom Access

In a first round advance for the anti-LGBTQ litigation group Alliance Defending Freedom, a federal court judge has allowed a lawsuit challenging the Palatine, Illinois, high school district’s policy that allows trans students to use restrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender identity to proceed on theories of sexual harassment and free exercise of religion.

The March 29 ruling by District Judge Jorge L. Alonso came in response to a suit filed by students and their parents in the district who claim the policy unfairly discriminates against cisgender students who don’t want to be exposed to trans students when using what the plaintiffs refer to as “privacy facilities.”

However, Alonso dismissed a claim the policy violated the cisgender students’ right to bodily privacy or their parents’ right to direct their children’s education.

In ruling on a motion to dismiss, the court assumed that the plaintiffs’ factual allegations as true in deciding whether they have stated a potentially valid legal claim. The school district, which moved to dismiss all the claims, has not filed an answer to the complaint, so the plaintiffs’ rather argumentative characterization of the facts has not yet been challenged. 

The Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, which advocates on behalf of LGBTQ students, has been granted intervenor status, as have three trans students. The Alliance and the student intervenors are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois and the ACLU LGBT & HIV Project.

The complaint uses terminology typical of ADF’s anti-LGBTQ propaganda.

“The crux of this suit is that defendants seek to affirm the claimed genders of students by allowing male students who claim female gender to use privacy facilities (i.e., bathrooms and locker rooms) designated for use by the female sex and female students who claim male gender to use privacy facilities designated for the male sex,” the ADF complaint reads. “Plaintiffs refer to the policy as District 211’s ‘compelled affirmation policy.’… District 211 adopted the policy solely to affirm the claimed genders of those students claiming a gender different from their sex at birth.”

The policy, the plaintiffs allege, has caused cisgender students “embarrassm­ent, humiliation, anxiety, fear, apprehension, stress, degradation, and the loss of dignity.” Those students, the suit contends, “are at continual risk of encountering (and sometimes do encounter), without their consent, members of the opposite sex while disrobing, showering, urinating, defecating, and while changing tampons and feminine napkins.”

GayCityNewsNYC.com, by Arthur Leonard, April 3, 2019

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in In the News / Legal / Transgender  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Mormon Church to Allow Children of LGBT Parents to Be Baptized

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormon Church, announced a remarkable reversal to its policies on LGBT people on Thursday.

mormon lgbt day

The decision rolls back a 2015 policy that barred children living with same-sex couples from important religious practices like baby-naming ceremonies and baptisms. That policy also declared that LGBT Mormon church members in same-sex marriages were apostates and subject to excommunication.

“Effective immediately, children of parents who identify themselves as LGBT may be baptized without First presidency approval,” the Mormon church’s First Presidency said in a statement on Thursday.

“While we still consider such a marriage to be a serious transgression, it will not be treated as apostasy for purposes of Church discipline,” the statement said. “Instead, the immoral conduct in heterosexual or homosexual relationships will be treated in the same way.”

The decision, instructed by President Dallin H. Oaks, who leads the church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, comes as the church prepares for its general conference this coming weekend.

NYTimes.com, by Elizabeth Dias, April 4, 2019

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in Ethics / In the News / Religious  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

‘License for Discrimination’: Texas Senate Advances Anti-LGBTQ Bill

Doctors, child care providers, counselors and other state-licensed workers who refuse to provide services based on “a sincerely held religious belief” would be protected under Senate Bill 17.

Texas gay marriage

The Texas Senate on Tuesday gave its initial OK to a bill that civil rights advocates say would give state-licensed workers — including doctors, child care providers and counselors — a free pass to discriminate, especially against people in the LGBTQ community.

Senate Bill 17, filed by state Senator Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, would bar state agencies that issue occupational licenses from penalizing workers who refuse to provide services based on “a sincerely held religious belief.” A worker could still be sued or fired, but the legislation would provide a legal defense in court, Perry said. The state licenses more than 150 types of workers, from cosmetologists to engineers. The bill would not apply in situations with a risk of death or serious bodily injury.

The bill, which has the support of Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, has prompted a vocal backlash. Dozens of people testified against the proposal in a committee hearing last week, while only a handful spoke in favor. Echoing the response to the 2017 “bathroom bill,” businesses including Apple, Google and Dell signed a letter opposing the bill, as well as another measure that would endanger local nondiscrimination policies. During debate Tuesday, Perry said he didn’t read the letter and views his proposal as a moral issue rather than an economic one.

SB 17 tentatively passed the upper chamber on a vote of 19-12, with Democrat Eddie Lucio of Brownsville and Republican Kel Seliger of Amarillo bucking party lines. Because the Senate requires a three-fifths majority, the bill would have died without Lucio’s blessing. Two companion House bills have been referred to committees in the lower chamber, but neither has received a hearing.

During floor debate, Seliger questioned whether a state-licensed worker should be able to deny service to a gay couple or a Muslim person. “When do you tell the difference between firmly held religious belief and bias?” he asked. Perry responded that there is “no real definition” of a sincerely held religious belief: “It’s what you practice and what you believe.”

TExasObserver.org, By Vicki Camerillo, April 4, 2019

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in In the News / Legislation / Politics  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Americans Show Broad Support for LGBT Nondiscrimination Protections

Across Lines of Party, Demographics, and Geography, Americans Broadly Support Nondiscrimination Protections for LGBT People

gay america

Americans remain supportive of broad nondiscrimination protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people. Nearly seven in ten (69%) Americans favor laws that would protect LGBT people from discrimination in the job market, public accommodations, and housing.

Support by Age Group

Younger Americans are 17 percentage points more likely than older Americans to say they support laws protecting LGBT people from various forms of discrimination. More than three-quarters (76%) of younger Americans (ages 18-29) favor such laws, compared to (59%) of seniors (ages 65 and older).

Support by Political Party and Ideology

Support for nondiscrimination protections enjoys broad support across the political spectrum. Majorities of Democrats (79%), independents (70%), and Republicans (56%) say they favor laws that would shield LGBT people from various kinds of discrimination. While support among Democrats and independents has remained relatively constant, Republican support for these provisions has fallen five percentage points over the past few years, down from (61%)  in 2015.

Majorities of liberals (81%), moderates (76%), and conservatives (55%) all favor nondiscrimination protections for LGBT people.

Ideological differences are more pronounced among Democrats and independents than among Republicans. The biggest intra-party divide is among Democrats: Liberal Democrats (87%) are likelier than moderate (76%) and conservative (61%) Democrats to favor nondiscrimination laws protecting LGBT people. Liberal (79%) and moderate (78%) independents are also likelier than conservative independents (58%) to support nondiscrimination protections.

Notably, self-identified moderate Republicans (69%) are likelier than self-identified liberal Republicans (59%) or conservative Republicans (53%) to favor laws protecting LGBT people from discrimination. Conservative Democrats (61%) are about as likely as liberal Republicans (59%) to favor nondiscrimination protections for LGBT people.

PRRI.org, March 12, 2019 by
Daniel Greenberg, Emma Beyer, Maxine Najle, PhD, Oyindamola Bola, Robert P. Jones, PhD

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in In the News / Parenting / Religious / Science  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

What’s covered under New York’s new IVF law?

The New York Law will cover fertility treatment, including IVF, for up to 2.4 million

frozen eggs

With more young women and men delaying parenthood, the demand for fertility treatments such as egg freezing and in-vitro fertilization (IVF) has grown across the country.

Legislation and science have lagged behind the trend, and the cost of the treatments can be prohibitively expensive.

A new law, enacted in the 2020 state budget, mandates that certain large-group insurance plans cover IVF, and requires all private insurance companies to cover medically necessary egg freezing.

It is projected to benefit to up to 2.4 million New Yorkers, according to figures from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s administration, but there are kinks to iron out before it guarantees coverage to the other half of insured New Yorkers, including gay men, Medicaid-recipients, and the self-employed.

Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa, the first woman to hold that position, pushed for IVF legislation in the spending plan, citing it as a top priority for the two-year-old Council for Women and Girls.

DeRosa, 36, said that she understands the anxiety of women in her age group who are pressured to decide between advancing their careers and starting a family.

There is nothing more personal or life altering than the ability to conceive and making the choice about when to conceive,” DeRosa said. “As someone who is currently facing these life-altering decisions, I know firsthand the toll they take — emotionally and financially.”

TimesUnion.com by Rachel Silberstein, April 1, 2019

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in Assisted Reproductive Technology / In the News / IVF / Legislation  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

New Report Shows International Adoption Edging Closer To Extinction

The industry’s overregulation is making it increasingly difficult for willing families to take the plunge and attempt international adoption.

Rachel Garber always knew she wanted to adopt a child. Besides having grown up with five adopted siblings, in 2007 she made a memorable trip to the Chinese city of Xi’an, where she spent a month volunteering at a home for abandoned babies. “During this trip my feelings on adoption were solidified,” she says. “I met my husband Ryan in 2010, and he knew right away that if we got married, we would end up going to China for a child.”

While those plans were temporarily put on hold after their son Nixon was born with special needs, in 2017 the Garbers were finally matched with a little boy in China. After committing to his file, they learned that he was from the very city where Rachel had previously volunteered: Xi’an. “It was meant to be,” she says.

Rachel and Ryan brought their second son, Nolan, home from China to Wyoming last year. Today he is 3 1/2 years old and thriving. His mom describes him as “very loving and yet very strong-willed!” A nearby doctor happens to be the foremost authority in Nolan’s area of medical need. “From the moment we met our son, he has been a joy,” Rachel says. “We have had many hard days, or days where I question my ability, but I can’t imagine our life without him.”

In a nation where tens of thousands of families have adopted children from overseas, the Garbers’ story may sound familiar. But it is a story that is growing increasingly rare. International adoptions to America have been falling dramatically for the past 15 years, and a recent report shows that the decline hasn’t slowed.

The U.S. Department of State’s annual intercountry adoption report to Congress, released in March, shows that Nolan Garber was one of just 4,059 children adopted from overseas in FY 2018. This represents a 13 percent decline since the prior year, an 82 percent decline since intercountry adoption’s peak in 2004, and a new historic low.

Why Is International Adoption Disappearing?

In its report, the Department of State (DOS)—which functions as the U.S. authority over international adoption—offers a few explanations for the latest decline. It notes that the largest decrease last year occurred in China, where the communist government has been suppressing the activities of all foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

TheFederalist.com, By Wendy Metzgar, April 2, 2019

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in Adoption / International / Parenting / Recently Added  by Anthony Brown 0 comments